Application of FEM for the Estimation of Thermo-Mechanical Properties of Plasma Sprayed Composite Coatings

As everybody knows, the presence of defects such as of voids, inter-lamellar porosities or cracks, provides a decrease of the effective thermal conductivity of plasma sprayed coatings as well as a decrease of the corresponding mechanical properties such as the Young’s modulus. In general, effective properties of coatings are thus strongly different from that of the bulk material and have thus to be measured. A complementary approach allowing understanding the relationships between the microstructure of a coating and its macro-properties is the use of Finite Element Modeling. Moreover, the case of composite coatings is still more complicated due to the presence of different materials. In the present study, thermo-mechanical properties of a plasma sprayed composite coating were estimated by numerical modeling based on FEM. The applied method uses directly cross-section micrographs without simplification using a one-cell per pixel approach. The cases of thermal conductivity, of the Young’s modulus, of the Poisson’s ratio and of the dilatation coefficient were considered. The selected example was an AlSi/polyester coating used as abradable material.